In computer based key frame character animation as used, e.g., to make feature films, video, etc., during the animation process, parts of the character are deformed by a soft mesh deformation to emulate skin deformation due to the character's flesh and muscle movement driven by the rigid body animation along the joints of the character. It is a tedious manual process for the animation artist (animator) to resolve the interpenetration or volume loss of the resulting deformed bodies, but both are required for the animation to look smooth and realistic. To resolve interpenetration, this process requires, for each frame, the artist to move each point inside the interpenetration region, and likely other surrounding points also. To preserve volume, the artist has to make global changes involving possibly all points in a consistent and uniform way to preserve appearance, shape and volume for each frame. To do both consistently so as to minimize “popping” across frames makes the process both time consuming and challenging for the artists.
There are publications in physics based volume preserving deformation and collision resolution; see for instance Gentaro Hirota, et al., “Volume preserved free form deformation”, ACM Solid Modelling '99, 1999; and Ari Rappoport, et al., “Volume-Preserving Free-Form Solids”, ACM Symposium on Solid Modelling, 1995. This type of process relies heavily on the physical characteristics of the deformed body's skin, or outer surface, which makes them hard to integrate into the artist directed animation process for characters.
Physics based deformation and collision resolution thus is difficult to integrate into artist driven character animation. The following exemplary publications are more closely related to computer based character animation: Alexis Angelidis, et al. “Swirling Sweepers: Constant volume modeling”, Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics, 2004; and Karen Singh, et al. “Wires: A geometric deformation technique”, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, 1998.